Sedo Study Reveals Steady Domain Growth in 2010

(The Hosting News) – Sedo recently announced the results of its 2010/Q4 2010 Domain Market Study which reveals domain industry trends and changes based on transactions in its marketplace. As of the end of Q4 2010, Sedo’s global marketplace now hosts over 18 million domain names and produced $101,438,953 in total sales for 2010, putting Sedo over the $100 million dollar mark for the very first time. Since 2009, the total annual sales increased to over $2.5 million, marking the largest annual sales growth for Sedo to date.

“In this quarter alone, Sedo has sold some of the most valuable, premium domain names the domain market has ever seen, which coincidentally represent four of the top ten Sedo sales of all time” .The domain market, as represented by the Sedo marketplace, has seen notable growth in the volume of domains changing hands this year in comparison to 2009. As seen in previous year over year comparisons, the first two quarters of 2010 produced more sales than the second half of the year with Q4 showing slightly higher sales volume than Q3.

While the .co extension has yet to break into the top ten ccTLD list, notable sales such as e.co, beauty.co and auction.co have helped position this new extension to compete for a top spot in the upcoming quarters as awareness of the .co extension continues to increase.

“The growth in Sedo’s marketplace has been consistently on the upswing as more businesses are seeing the value in domain names,” says Jeremiah Johnston, COO and general counsel of Sedo. “While average sales prices are up as a reflection of large sales in 2010, the increase in average median prices is the true indicator of market growth and stability.”

Highlights of Sedo’s 2010/Q4 2010 study include:

•The most popular gTLD continues to be .com, accounting for 76% of all Q4 gTLD sales and 75% of all 2010 gTLD sales. The .net comes in a distant 2nd with 11% of the market share. •All gTLDs increased year over year in median sales prices.

•Transaction volume showed a steady increase with 10,326 in sales during the quarter, a slight 2% percent increase from Q3 2010. Q4 2010 is also up 2% compared to Q4 2009.

•A steady increase in the average sale price across all major gTLDs in 2010 compared with 2009. Specifically, the .com extension witnessed a 74% increase in average sales price year over year.

•Among country code TLDs (ccTLDs) the .de extension remains the most commonly sold ccTLD domain extension, followed by the .eu, which pushed ahead of the .co.uk extension in 2010 for the first time since being introduced to the market in 2005.

•Offer/Counter-offer transactions continued to be the most popular sales type, accounting for 40 percent of transactions, while fixed-price sales accounted for 25 percent, and auctions accounted for 20 percent.

•Top US sales include Sex.com for $13,000,000, Poker.org for $1,000,000 and Ringtones.com for $750,000.

“In this quarter alone, Sedo has sold some of the most valuable, premium domain names the domain market has ever seen, which coincidentally represent four of the top ten Sedo sales of all time,” continued Jeremiah Johnston. “Shorter domain names like Sex.com, which sold for a whopping $13 million last quarter, are highly prized for their branding and marketing potential, their traffic and the benefits they provide their owners in search engine marketing and additional revenue streams. We look forward to continuing to offer businesses of all sizes the most distinctive and hard to come by domains available on the market today.”

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